Small but perfectly formed
The Grade Ii-listed houses in Bourton-on-the-water Model Village were made to mirror the town they sit in. Owner Andrew Lund-yates tells BEE BAILEY about the pub landlord who built it in the 1930s, tiny house restoration and his endless to-do list
THE roof of the Old New Inn is causing problems. It’s been damaged by the weather and needs replacing completely. As any owner of an old building knows, one job often leads to another, and another, and another. From past experience, Andrew Lund-yates knows that taking the roof off one of his Grade-ii listed properties means the entire thing may well have to come down.
It’s yet another maintenance job on his never-ending to-do list because Andrew and his wife Julie – owners of Bourton-onthe-water Model Village – have about 80 listed buildings to look after. Thankfully they are, at least, very small. Currently repairs are scheduled for the Painted House, and the little river needs to be drained to sort out a leak on the riverbank, but on any given day the restoration team might also have a broken chimney pot that needs to be re-made, wooden doors that have rotted in the rain, or a frost damaged wall that’s been accidentally knocked down by a clumsy visitor.
“Because the buildings were all built in a three-year timespan, they are all ageing at the same rate,” Andrew says. “[In normal life] you would look after one house, when there’s 80 of them and they are all ageing at the same pace it’s quite a challenge to keep them in good order.”
The couple started as visitors to The Model Village, taking their four children on day trips to see the miniature houses and the extra-small model village within the model village when they were young. In 2018, when the fullsize Old New Inn and the model village in its garden came up for sale, they jumped in.
Now that Andrew and Julie’s children are aged between 24 and 37, it’s their five-year-old granddaughter who towers above the houses, crouching down to the miniature Old New Inn and pointing out which window is her bedroom when she comes to stay with her grandparents.
Andrew remembers how much his children loved the attraction.
“If we said we were going to Bourton, the kids always made a beeline for the model village,” he says. “They loved that everything was in miniature and they were miles bigger than all the buildings. They could play at being giants.
“When the business came up for sale it was a no-brainer. It has always been in our hearts.”
The model village was built in 1936, opening the following year to coincide with the coronation of King George VI and his wife, Elizabeth, later known as the Queen Mother. It was finally finished in 1940, gaining its Grade II listing in 2013.
The man behind the project was Charles A. Morris, known as Cam from his initials, who was then the pub’s landlord.
Andrew explains: “As the charabancs were starting to make their way out of the Midlands for family days out, they headed to Bourton. Cam wanted them coming to his pub and not anyone else’s.
“It was going to start off as a fairy grotto but someone suggested a model village. He got a load of stonemasons and carpenters and recreated the centre of the village in his back garden.”
A short British Pathé news reel on Youtube, entitled Lilliput Village (1938), shows Cam’s men – dressed in flat caps, waistcoats and rolled-up shirtsleeves – walking around Bourton measuring up the fullsize houses with yardsticks, and the stonemasons and carpenters constructing 1/9th scale replicas.
Andrew is impressed by the business savvy idea his predecessor had: “It shows the entrepreneurism of a landlord who saw a business opportunity with the coaches coming. It was a brilliant way of getting the customers to his pub, have a drink and then go for a wander around the model village.”
Today, the 150,000 people who visit every year will largely see what those dressed in their hats and Sunday-best saw in the 1930s. There is a miniature Windrush river with miniature bridges, and streets lined with 80-year-old cherry, apple and pear trees that produce normal-sized fruit and pink blossom, even though they are pruned to be kept very small.
There’s a scaleddown version of Victoria Hall, where gentlemen used to go to read their newspapers in peace and quiet; the war memorial that sits at the heart of the village, a church with the sound of singing coming from inside; and the Old New Inn, which is about to undergo its sixmonth-long overhaul.
Luke Heeley, who is head of restoration and maintenance and does the stonemasonry work; Veronika Fortelna, the head gardener; and Jim Darrin, restoration and maintenance, care for both the model village and the full-size Old New Inn.
They built it in stone panels and then etched the brickwork in Andrew Lund-yates on the village
They relish the restoration challenges that mean mastering many different skills on a much smaller scale.
“Every day throws a curve ball. Someone might have kicked over a piece of the model village that we need to repair before 10 o’clock when visitors come in, or we might have electric issues in the restaurant,” Andrew says. “There’s never a dull day.”
About £30,000 is budgeted for maintenance every year, split 50/50 between the full-size building and the village. The biggest project this year will be rebuilding the model inn.
The main inn, which dates back to the 1700s, stands on what was once the edge of a moor which stretched from the Cotswolds to Oxford, a place where coaching horses used to stop to rest before travelling across the moor. Inside it has had a major refurb but, externally, its smaller sibling is identical.
“The [model] Old New Inn is suffering a lot of weather damage so we are going to have to take the whole building down and rebuild it from the bottom up,” Andrew says.
“Cotswold stone is a sandstone, it’s very susceptible to water, and we get lichen and moss growing in the roof tiles that freezes and breaks the stone. We know there’s significant damage. Because of the way it was constructed you can’t just take one tile off and replace it, we have to take the whole slab of tiles off.
“It will be heart breaking to take it down but we’ll rebuild it as good as new and try to use as much of the stone we take out as we possibly can.”
Before the work is complete Andrew’s team will place a time capsule inside the building, containing copies of the current restaurant menus and details of the hotel’s refurbishment so that in years to come, someone else can find a snapshot of life in the village today.
Thankfully the owners aren’t bound by the same rigorous checks that full-scale listed buildings are. Although its listing means buildings can’t be removed or added, the structures can be repaired and restored to be sturdier such as removing the rotting wood structure inside the buildings and replacing it with new steel innards that won’t detract from the external appearance.
In essence, the model village will always look very much as it was when it was built. The only exception is that as shops and businesses come and go, the signage on the models is changed to match.
Andrew believes in ‘paying homage’ to the original craftsmen’s work and materials, such as using stone from Farmington quarry in Northleach, the same quarry as Cam’s original team sourced its stone from.
“When the model village was built it wasn’t built brick by brick, they built it in stone panels and then etched the brickwork into the stone panels. “When we open up the buildings, the stone inside is very roughly hewn. Now when we go to the quarry they put it through laser machines which cut it within a millimetre of what we ask the panels to be.”
The restoration team take the new slab of stone back to the workshop and etch the stonework on to it, cut out windows, and craft mullion frames for the glass to go in. Many jobs require brainstorming ideas to work out how things were originally done and how they can be recrafted, something the team gets a buzz from.
As one job is ticked off the list, another takes its place.
“It’s just a massive restoration job, continuous,” Andrew says. “It’s like painting the Forth Road Bridge – it’s never going to end. We just keep going as best that we can. The meticulous maintenance and the charm of feeling like Roald Dahl’s Big Friendly Giant as you walk down the High Street makes it a place that people want to revisit time and again over the years.
“You think everyone has visited but, like us, they then bring their children, and their grandchildren,” Andrew says.
“We get a lot of people coming saying, ‘It’s 60 years since we came here. Here’s the photograph; where’s that building?’ You try to piece together where the picture was taken from. We’ve had people recreate their old photographs, standing in the same positions.”
Those interactions are new memories to add to the old for Andrew and Julie, the proud custodians of a miniature Cotswold village that has featured in millions of family photographs over the decades He says: “It’s a joy to own it and look after it and make it as good as we possibly can for future generations.”
They loved that everything was in miniature... they could play at being giants